It might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility.

How much simpler it would be all around if you could put your mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of sympathy from other people instead of skepticism (“You can’t really be feeling as bad as all that”) and in some cases outright hostility (“Maybe if you stopped thinking about yourself so much ”).

There's something stubborn about families, unhappy ones in particular: they outlive themselves, and then they live on.

It was through reading that I discovered the crucial, even sacrosanct place the rituals of drinking held in the American imagination - the ingenious way alcohol seemed to lubricate everything from onerous chitchat to self-conscious sexual advances.

No bill of sexual rights can hold its own against the lawless, untamable landscape of the erotic imagination.

Everyone lies about sex, more or less, to themselves if not to others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance or minimizing its pull.

Much as I try to disguise myself, there is never a time when I'm not aware of being overweight.